likely.”
“Why? What’s been happening while I’ve been off the radar?”
“There have been some clashes. Our informant is still feeding us useful intel. We’ve had several dustups with the Chosen.”
“Sorry I missed the party,” I lied. In truth, I wasn’t looking to jump back into any firefights with the Kings’ field troops.
We had learned about the Seven Kings a few weeks after my first mission with the Department of Military Sciences. Mr. Church had received an anonymous phone call from a source even MindReader was unable to trace. The call had come in on Church’s private line, a number known only to key people: the President of the United States, a few people in government, the heads of the top counterterrorist organizations belonging to our allies, and the team leaders of the DMS. Either one of them was the mysterious caller or the caller had managed to learn that private number or the caller had the technology to hack into Church’s coded phone. None of those options was particularly comforting.
He was able to record the call, however, and played it back for us … .
Chapter Four
Telephone Call
June 23, 8:17 A.M. EST
“I want to speak to Colonel Eldritch.”
Eldritch was one of a dozen different names for the man I knew as Church. None of them were his real name as far as I knew.
“Who is this?” Church asked.
“A friend.” The caller spoke through a voice-distortion system that made it impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Your ID is blocked. My friends don’t need to hide their identities.”
“Then consider me a new friend.”
“What is the basis for our new friendship?”
“A shared interest in the security of our nation.”
“Will you tell me your name?”
“My name is of no importance. What
“Who is that?”
“A group of loyal Americans whose actions are always in the best interest of America.”
The caller had not said
“What do you want?”
“There is a new and grave threat to this country.”
“What is the nature of this threat?”
“It is a group called the Seven Kings of the New World Trust.”
“Who are they?” asked Church. “And what is their agenda?”
“Chaos,” said the caller.
“What kind of chaos?”
“Total. Global. Apocalyptic.”
“Excuse me,” said Church, “but this is bordering on being a crank call. If you are a loyal American as you claim, and if there is a threat about which you have knowledge, then please give me the facts in plain and simple terms.”
There was a sound that might have been a short laugh. “For reasons that I do not care to explain, I cannot give you too much information on the Seven Kings. Perhaps I will be able to share some information from time to time.”
“Will you give me something now?”
“Yes. Something that will save American lives.” The caller gave Church the location of a Hamas cell operating in Washington, D.C., that was being funded by the Seven Kings. “This group plans to strike tomorrow during the afternoon rush hour. Many people will die, including key members of Congress. You can stop this.”
“That’s it?” Church demanded. “You speak of a group dedicated to global chaos and the downfall of our country and all you give me is a single terrorist cell? How do I know I can trust you?”
“You’ll find the cell.”
And then the caller disconnected.
Chapter Five
After-Action Report
Washington, D.C.
June 23, 1:44 P.M. EST
We followed up with recon and verified the cell’s existence. Fourteen hostiles and enough weapons and explosives to start a war. Or tear the capital apart.
I led the hit.
D.C. had been in the crosshairs since long before 9/11, so there are fifty kinds of counterterrorism protocols built into the infrastructure and dozens of agencies are tasked with gathering intel. It’s all supposed to be shared. Politicians aren’t supposed to lie, either.
Our people used MindReader to hack everyone else’s database and dump everything into one massive pattern-recognition search. By collating information from a dozen different agencies we learned that much more was known about this matter than any one group believed and the reason everyone who needed to know
It fell to the Department of Military Sciences to put the pieces together and put boots on the ground. Thanks to MindReader.
When Mr. Church formed the DMS he built it around a computer system that was several generations ahead of anything else known to exist. MindReader was designed to look for trends and the software was very carefully crafted to take into account some factors that might otherwise be missed, and although computers can’t generalize or make intuitive leaps, this one came pretty damn close. Its other unique feature was that it could intrude into virtually any other computer system without tripping alarms. When MindReader backed out, it rewrote the target computer’s software so that there was no record that it had ever been hacked. It was a highly dangerous system, and Church guarded it like a dragon.
So less than five hours after the mysterious call—from someone whom everybody except Church was already calling Deep Throat—disconnected we had snipers on rooftops, choppers in the air, a satellite retasked to do thermal scans, and Echo Team ready to kick in the doors.
The cell was located in a small frame house on Ninth Street in the Penn Quarter section of D.C. Lots of foot
